Furies (26 page)

Soldiers on campaign were bound to be riddled with lice and fleas, owing to their cramped and filthy living conditions, particularly as they bedded down for the night. When Simplicius, the soldier-hero of Grimmelshausen's novel about the Thirty Years War, says that being infested with lice was “like sitting in an ant heap,” the exaggeration seems to carry a hard core of truth and experience. The louse and flea were the raw carriers of the plague and typhus bacteria. Typhoid and the varieties of dysenteric fevers were caused, instead, by the ingestion of food or water contaminated by the feces of human carriers of the disease. In the stinking encampments, with their entourages of camp followers, the regulations that prescribed degrees of cleanliness fell on deaf ears. Fecal matter slipped easily into the drinking water and food chain.

Typhoid fever had mortality rates of up to 25 percent. Plague was more than twice as deadly, particularly when its bacillus entered the lungs or bloodstream. Death rates now shot up to between 50 and 70 percent of all those infected. Many soldiers seem to have developed immunities to the whole range of infectious maladies. The diarist Peter Hagendorf, who lived right through the Thirty Years War, was one of these. And Hans Heberle, the shoemaker, must rank as a classic example of the civilian who survives waves of contagion, while all around him people die of plague, typhus, and relapsing fever.

IN THE CALCULATIONS OF CONTEMPORARIES, the numbers of conscripted and mercenary soldiers who were killed in battle or by disease were habitually a matter of guesswork or politics. Once the death of leading noblemen and officers had been noted, the task of getting at the true numbers of casualties turned into a matter of hit and miss, the natural result of princely and elite attitudes toward the common soldier. But conflicting reports of casualties, with their
great disparities, could also be motivated by politics, as in their concealing of losses in defeat or even in victory.

One of the most detailed studies of combat losses, focused on three major battles of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), concludes that politics, lies, and wishful thinking were responsible for the sharp differences in casualty estimates. Figures for the dead at the battle of Agnadello (1509) varied from six thousand to twenty thousand men; at Ravenna (1512) from ten thousand to thirty thousand; and at Marignano (1515) from eighteen thousand to thirty thousand.

We met the taking of plunder full-blown in the sacking of cities. But the subject also had a unique dimension with compelling details. Pawnbrokers, art collections, books, ransoming, and other interests break into the picture—even the plundering of states. The subject deserves separate consideration.

The biggest haul of the seventeenth century came out of the Imperial palace at Prague, and more specifically from its
Kunstkammer.
Here the Emperor Rudolf II of Austria (d. 1612) had assembled the finest art and curio collection in Europe, with pictures by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Dürer, Breughel, Bosch, and other masters. More than another fifteen hundred rare items and objets d'art went to complete the collection, including bronze and amber figures, agate and earthenware vessels, clocks, medals and coins, mathematical instruments, and Indian curios. But this “museum” would not remain in the possession of the Habsburgs. At the end of the Thirty Years War, just as the Peace of Westphalia was about to be signed, and with Prague in the hands of the Swedish army, Gustavus Adolphus's daughter, Queen Christina of Sweden, had the collection seized, including the books, and shipped to Sweden. As soldiers hurried to complete the packing, this brazen act of wholesale theft may even have delayed negotiations in Westphalia. Items were pilfered on their way to Sweden, but on April 14, 1649, the haul finally reached Stockholm. There indeed, for some years, residents had already been witness to the construction of palaces paid for by war
booty, the property of Swedish officers, noblemen chiefly. When the Scottish soldier Sir James Turner made a short visit there in 1640, he entered a city, he said, greatly “beautified with those sumptuous and magnificent palaces which the Swedish generalls have built, as monuments of these riches they acquired in the long German warre.”

Historians frequently refer to plundering soldiers. They seldom highlight the crooked doings of princes.

JEWELRY, BAGS OF SILVER AND gold coins, plate, candelabra, and silks: These were the prized objects of looting soldiers. Larger items, such as ornate furniture, were typically pawned—converted into cash for food, gambling, or even for desertion from the army. Men with more educated tastes might also be on the lookout for pictures, sculptures, books, tapestries, or even imported rugs and carpets from the Middle East. Of all these, in fact, Europe's cities had considerable quantities. Herds of horses, too, if sold at true market values, fetched high prices. Another form of plunder was one of the most lucrative and widespread of all activities in war zones: the capture and “possessing” of people, especially the rich or titled, with an eye to ransoming them. And we shall see that even houses and whole palaces could be ransomed. Here, as in the case of all valuable booty, army officers were the leading predators.

But before proceeding with marketable plunder, we must cast a glance at loot of a quite different order, far less obvious but far more fateful. I mean the theft of states, of lordships and principalities. This was all-encompassing booty which also, in a sense, cast a veil of validation over the ordinary forms of plunder. For according to a rule in logic and Roman law, if, in the affairs of the world, the greater right over something be granted, then all the more so must the lesser one be allowed, because it is covered by the more inclusive right.

In this connection, then, we must ask: What about the outright expropriation of states, such as when a ruler seized a free city or a
territorial state by the force of arms? Was this not a form of theft, even though it would be masked by self-righteous argument, claims regarding “the laws of war,” rhetorical flourishes, and legal sophistries? Florence's conquest of Pisa in 1406 was plunder. In the fifteenth century, Venice's armed seizures on the Italian mainland—Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and then Brescia and Bergamo—were plunder, if also, more grandly, acquisitions in the process of “state building.” They extended the Serene Republic deep into Lombardy.

In the sixteenth century, the Valois-Habsburg struggles for the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Milan were combat for spoils, as well as for prestige and alleged matters of hereditary right. When German princes imposed the Lutheran or the Reformed (Calvinist) Church on their subjects, they confiscated lordships and vast landed estates belonging to the bishoprics and religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church. Many contemporaries saw this as outright plunder. The Edict of Restitution (1629), Ferdinand II's formal attempt to reclaim the old episcopal lordships and estates of the Catholic Church reaching back to 1552, was certainly regarded by Protestant princes as an outrageous act of thuggery. In the 1630s, Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII were ready to see the duchy of Lorraine razed, rather than let its ruler and subjects have an autonomy which kept them outside the kingdom of France. Here was a contested sovereignty, to be sure, but the matter was being decided by steel and fire.

Armies in the Thirty Years War took the looting of states out to new frontiers. In his campaign to hold on to the kingdom of Bohemia, Ferdinand II crushed its rebellious Protestant nobility (1620), sequestered their estates, and ended by putting half of all Bohemian territory into the hands of new owners, chiefly by means of sales to favorites. By 1625, Ferdinand's ambitious general Wallenstein was the owner of lands there that amounted to about one quarter of the country's total. Later, like the stateless Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and by the force of arms, he would seek a whole state for himself, the duchy of Mecklenburg, with the approval of Ferdinand.

But the most enterprising of all land and state grabbers was Gustavus Adolphus. In his fleet march through German lands, as his army swelled to more than ninety thousand soldiers, he became increasingly imperial in his outlook, proposing in effect to lay down a political and religious destiny for all the German princes and people. He even imagined raising an army of 225,000 men, his visions beckoning him into France and Spain. After his death (1632), Axel Oxenstierna, his great minister, fought to keep the Swedish conquests intact by handing out conquered lands and lordships to Swedish generals. These attempted alienations, with no basis in law, were intended to be their payment as army officers. In turn, they were to use their new lands and incomes to pay their officers and soldiers. Plunder in early modern Europe had never known such scope and brass.

It would be too much to say that the seizure of petty or partial sovereignties served to validate the wartime plunder of soldiers in town and country. There was nothing in the air so precise and clear as this. In the lawless disorder of war, the acquisitive activity of princes could look “natural” or acceptable. Priests and pastors easily pointed to God's wrath and condign punishments. In this climate, well-informed plundering officers and soldiers had little trouble finding moral comfort in the conduct of their political superiors. When two officers, as we shall see, told a German parish priest that their starving soldiers had an unconditional right to a share in the property of local villagers, they were suggesting that the force of necessity pushed conventional legal boundaries to one side and brought in a different way of seeing and being. The fact that rulers continually flouted the moral law with impunity by breaking all promises to soldiers, and that they thus engaged in theft by giving soldiers no choice but to be thieves: This—in the talk of plundering officers—was bound to diminish or alter their sense of what robbery was, as they moved like locusts over lands in war zones.

Princes such as Philip II of Spain, the Emperor Ferdinand II, and Maximilian of Bavaria would have been horrified to be told by a
friendly party that they were responsible, in a very real sense, for the wild looting, arson, and murdering that went on at the hands of their soldiers. But no priest or government minister was ever likely to say this to them; and if one had—conscience ever striving to put a good face on things—they would have found ways to reject the accusation.

FRITZ REDLICH, THE MAIN AUTHORITY on war booty in early modern Europe, traces the origins of unfettered plunder back to the idea of the medieval feud, to major grievances that had no redress except in war. Once a dispute had been pushed to the status of a feud, everything was permissible. Custom allowed adversaries to carry the fight out to the utmost extremes, to do as much harm as possible not only to the enemy but also to all those from whom he might receive any kind of assistance: servants, subjects, tenants, and allies. In other words, the winning side could take all, regardless of any peacetime notions of justice, whether lodged in Christian doctrine or in “natural law.” Redlich does not say so, but there is much in this form of take-all victory that goes back to the warrior ethos of the “barbarian” Goths and, before them, to the imperial legions of the Roman army. The process turned into the praxis of might makes right.

In the late middle ages, a line of canonist (legal) commentators sought to exclude priests, nuns, women, and children from the designs of plundering soldiers. But their voices fell on deaf ears. In the sixteenth century, efforts were made to check looting in friendly territory; and new rules aimed to control the distribution, sharing, or dividing up of booty. But it soon became clear, for example, that captured cannon and gunpowder belonged to the
plena potestas
, or full powers, of sovereignty—hence to rulers. For the rest, the primary right to the major share of any plunder in question belonged to the officers, above all to captains, colonels, and their superiors.

The premier land pirates of the age were the commanders of the Swedish armies in the Thirty Years War. Although coming from one of Europe's poorest countries, they captained some of the largest and
most effective fighting units of the second quarter of the seventeenth century. And yet, although being professionals who needed regular payment, neither they nor their armies could count on receiving their salaries and wages from the small tax or domain moneys that went into the royal coffers of the Vasa family. Swedish officers and armies had to live mainly off the wealth of the foreign lands that they traversed or occupied. Their need of “contributions” easily lost all sense of measure. In danger, and with the ordinary soldier frequently in tatters, Swedish officers and their men often grabbed everything of value that they could get their hands on.

In effect, then, the military wages and stipends that should have been paid out of Swedish taxes or foreign subsidies, in order to avoid robbery in the field, were extracted instead in the field from the peoples of occupied lands. War was turned into a self-funding activity.

MAXIMILIAN I OF BAVARIA HAD an outstanding art collection, rich particularly in German work, with pictures by Dürer, Holbein, and the Cranachs. When Gustavus Adolphus took Munich in May 1632, he cleaned out Maximilian's palace, as well as the houses of the local nobility, and had much of the booty wheeled away. An assortment of items was put up for sale, and Golo Mann reports that “art dealers from Ulm, Nürnberg, and Frankfurt hurried to the capital to obtain the stolen goods at auctions.” After Gustavus's death at Lützen, in November of the same year, what remained of the collection was dispersed, to be divided up apparently among some of his leading officers. Later, when Duke Maximilian tried desperately to have his treasures returned, his efforts came to nothing. And we must wonder if he was ever nagged by the fact that he himself did not have clean hands, as we are about to see.

Special collections at Stuttgart and Tübingen were looted by Imperial and Bavarian troops in 1634 and 1635. But the cardinal act of Catholic thievery involved the celebrated Palatine Library in the Castle of Heidelberg, the property of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V,
the so-called “Winter King” of Bohemia. When Heidelberg was stormed in 1622, the library was claimed by the plundering Duke of Bavaria, Maximilian, and donated to Pope Gregory XV. The consequent convoy of mules, bearing 196 cases of books and accompanied by the papal librarian himself, left Heidelberg in February 1623, went up the Rhine, passed through Munich, and worked its way over the Alpine passes to Rome, to be received by the next pope, Urban VIII. All was fair in war at least, if not in love.